venial
Other forms: venially
Some crimes are unforgivable. Others are venial — venial crimes and sins are excusable. They're not a big deal.
In school, there are so many things that are against the rules: talking during class, tossing spitballs, pulling the fire alarm, stealing a basketball, etc. Something venial would be something against the rules but forgivable. For example, if you were late for school because your parents were in the hospital, that lateness is venial. If you burned the gym down, that could never be considered venial. When you see venial, think "forgivable," "excusable," and "no biggie."
-
warranting only temporal punishment
-
easily excused or forgiven
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
venal / venial
Vocabulary lists containing venial
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Influenced by the duplicitous Iago, Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army, begins to doubt his wife's faithfulness.
As he grows up and develops his own sense of identity, Tony is guided by Ultima, a curandera who heals with magic.